'The Witness' Clip: Uncovering the Mysteries of Kitty Genovese's Death (Exclusive)
In the five decades since her death on a cold March night in 1964, Kitty Genovese has passed into cultural immortality. The circumstances of her death — attacked and murdered on the streets of her Queens neighborhood, while 38 neighbors allegedly watched and declined to intervene — have fascinated true crime buffs and sociologists ever since, serving as a convenient reference point when topics like bystander apathy or urban crime are broached. But those conversations tend to treat Genovese as more of a symbol than a person. That’s decidedly not the case for the family she left behind. In James Solomon’s new documentary The Witness, Kitty’s younger brother, Bill Genovese, searches for the human being behind the headlines. It’s a journey that takes the Vietnam veteran back to his sister’s neighborhood, re-visiting the same streets where she walked — and died.
Related: New Documentary ‘The Witness’ Debunks the Myths of the Infamous Kitty Genovese Murder
In this exclusive clip from the film above, which opens in limited release on June 3, Bill visits the very vestibule where Kitty — who’d been assaulted and stabbed by a man named Winston Moseley — took her final breaths. His guide is Michael Farrar, son of Sophia Farrar, a friend of Kitty’s who emerged from her apartment right after the attacks and held the dying woman. “You could actually smell the blood,” he remembers. Michael also explains that his mother declined to publicly discuss the case for years after being misquoted by a reporter. “That’s when my mother said, ‘It don’t pay to talk, because they twist what you say.’” (In general, The Witness takes the newspaper coverage of the case to task for reporting lapses, particularly the infamous stories published in The New York Times.) As Bill remarks later on in the film, these were details his family didn’t know about at the time, and it offers some comfort as he confronts the tragedy of his sister’s loss. “It would have made such a difference to my family, knowing that Kitty died in the arms of a friend.”
Watch the trailer: